“I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God save the King’. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.”

“It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box”

“It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during "God Save the King" than stealing from a poor box”

“We are the dead,' he said.'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.'Not physically. Six months, a year – five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So longs as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.''Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive!”

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.”

“What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.”

“For the first time in my life I took to writing things on walls. The passage-ways of several smart restaurants had ' Visca P.O.U.M.!' scrawled on them as large as I could write it. All the while, though I was technically in hiding, I could not feel myself in danger. The whole thing seemed too absurd. I had the ineradicable English belief that they cannot arrest you unless you have committed a crime. It is a most dangerous belief to have during a political pogrom.”